Stranger and fiction

It is almost midnight in Sydney when the phone rings, as arranged. "I am in my office," says Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. "We have this little studio in Copenhagen. It's a little after lunch, so I'm just having some coffee."

I tell him what time it is in Australia. "Is it that late?" he says. "What a strange place you live in."

Now that's ironic. With
Zentropa
(1991), Breaking The Waves
(1996), The Idiots
(1998) and Dancer in the Dark
(2000), von Trier has established himself as the CEO of Strange Inc. A man who once said, "A film should be like a rock in the shoe," von Trier seems to inhabit a world where there is no middle ground whatsoever.

As a person, by all accounts, the 47-year-old is eccentric, neurotic and polyphobic. As a filmmaker, he is equally bizarre, which gives him an uncanny power to polarise. The Cannes Film Festival awarded
Dancer in the Dark
its Palme d'Or; respected critics such as David Stratton detest his hand-held cameras and over-the-top melodrama.

In Australia, the debate about von Trier's work will be rekindled with his new film,
Dogville, which will be released on Boxing Day and stars Nicole Kidman in the lead role.

"He's an interesting man," Kidman says. "I've worked with Kubrick, with some difficult personalities, or what other people might deem difficult, and I get on with those people - I don't know what that says about me. He's beautifully kooky in the way that most people with a very strong vision are. They are uncompromising because they have a different outlook. I think it's important that there are those non-conformists in such a conformist world."

I mention that critics such as Stratton hate his work. "Other people call him a genius," Kidman says. "Either way he promotes discussion and sometimes violent discussion. Some people call him a misogynist, I know lots of feminists don't like him. I call myself a feminist, but I feel that certain things are interesting and this script is really strong."

Dogville
won't placate the feminists. In Breaking The Waves
and Dancer in the Dark, Emily Watson and Bjork played two women whose destiny was to suffer selflessly and profoundly in pursuit of love and hope. After being duped, bashed and raped, both died for their ideals.

In
Dogville, Kidman plays Grace, a mysterious, beautiful stranger who turns up in a tiny backwater in the Rocky Mountains. Fleeing from gunshots, Grace is warmly embraced by the townsfolk, until they turn and begin abusing her relentlessly. So she contemplates revenge. In other words, once again von Trier has written and directed a film about a woman who is strong and noble, but also a victim.

If von Trier has powerful, contradictory emotions about women, perhaps that's because in 1995 his mother told him on her deathbed that his father was not, in fact, his father. On hearing the news, von Trier tracked down his biological father, who turned out to be a 90-year-old man who had been his mother's boss. After four charged meetings, the old man told von Trier not to speak to him again unless it was through his lawyer.

Well, that's how the story has been reported anyway. With von Trier, it's hard to separate fact from fiction. It could easily be some sort of joke circulated by von Trier himself.

I had read that von Trier was making a trilogy of films about tragic women, beginning with
Breaking The Waves, continuing with
Dancer in the Dark
and concluding with Dogville. When I ask about this, von Trier - who, according to another story, was born Lars Trier and adopted the "von" at film school - just laughs. "I want to make 100 films about tragic women," he says.

"No, the idea is to make three films with this character Grace and we're going to go along with that, but it's not going to be Nicole playing in the next two. She wants very much to do it and I want very much to have her in it, but we both have other [projects].

"I don't know when Lars changed his mind about the trilogy," says Stellan Skarsgard, a von Trier regular who co-stars in
Dogville. "Or when he invented the new trilogy." With von Trier, it seems, the goalposts are on wheels.

"Now all three of these films are about Grace travelling around America," Skarsgard says.

This is controversial, too. Von Trier has a phobia about aircraft, and just about every other mode of transport, so he has never been to the US.

"It was great fun at a press conference in Cannes because an American journalist accused Lars of being anti-American," Skarsgard says. "Lars said, 'I've never been to America, so if the picture I give of America is not truthful, it's not my fault. It's just a mirror; this is the way America portrays itself to me.' "

Von Trier says the makers of
Casablanca
never went to Casablanca and that anti-American accusations have inspired him to make even more films set in the US. So now Dogville
is part one of what he calls his U, S and A trilogy.

Apart from all else, von Trier is a consummate stirrer. Here's another example: the male protagonist in
Dogville, played by Paul Bettany, is named Tom. I can't help thinking von Trier chose the name primarily to extract a more potent performance from Kidman, who was separating from husband Tom Cruise at the time of shooting.

Another controversial aspect to
Dogville
is its style. To dub it minimalist is a heinous overstatement. It was shot on a single, blackened stage in Sweden where houses, shrubbery and even a dog were identified by nothing more than an outline painted on the floor. The result is a film that is much more theatrical (and specifically, Beckett-like) than cinematic.

"Lars's style of working has developed a lot," says Skarsgard. "He's much more extreme now. Back [on
Breaking The Waves] we did each scene whatever way we wanted. This time we were shooting 360 degrees all the time. And Lars was carrying the camera, so it was just the actors and Lars on the set."

It must have been a demanding way to work, which is a von Trier trademark. After
Dancer in the Dark, Bjork vowed never to act again. A pity, given her performance won the best actress award at Cannes, but so far she's kept her promise.

"As a movie actor you're never in control, because they can cut [edit] you better or worse," says Skarsgard. "But you always have the illusion that you have some control over your role. When you work with Lars that illusion is gone - you know you don't have any control over your role.

"The way he works, he calls it sampling, that means that you actually work on the scene and see how far you can take it in different directions. So you do a scene totally different and several times, then he cuts between all those different takes and composes it himself.

"When I'd done the rape scene a couple of times, he suddenly said to me 'Stellan, can't you play it as a romantic comedy?' And I said, 'Um, I'm not sure that's going to work, Lars, but I'll do it.' And of course it didn't work, but there were a few exchanges that were very interesting and he cut out just those two lines and put them in."

Does von Trier himself think he's a demanding director for actors? "That really depends on what their attitude is," he says. "If you're the kind of actor that starts by reading a script then deciding how this character is going to be and what is going to happen, then I think you may be disappointed. In the way I'm working, it's very difficult for an actor to control where the film ends. It's playful, I would like to call it. And if you're interested in that, and Nicole was, and loved to do a scene over and over again and try different things, then I think it's a good experience. Otherwise," he laughs, "it can be a very tiresome experience, I'm sure."

Says Skarsgard: "There were so many confrontations between Bjork and Lars because for her entire life she's been in total control over her music and videos. Having two control freaks on the set is hard."

Von Trier is famous as the figurehead of Dogme, an anti-Hollywood movement he founded with a few pals in the mid-1990s. Dogme imposed a stringent set of rules on filmmakers: they must use hand-held cameras, no artificial lighting, no props other than those found on set and so on. Von Trier directed the second Dogme film himself:
The Idiots, a confronting drama about bored, bourgeois Danes who pretend to have disabilities.

But, like
Dancer in the Dark,
Dogville
is not a Dogme film. As much as he enjoys drafting and implementing a radical constitution, von Trier savours tearing it up and tossing it out the window.

He usually works on various projects at once. Since 1991, he has been taking a three-minute shot every year for a film he expects to finish in 2024. As with so many stories I have heard, I wonder whether this 33-year project is just a rumour. Apparently not.

"That started out when I was very optimistic about how old I was going to get," he says. "But mostly at the moment I'm working on this big German opera project, for the stage, the Ring cycle by Wagner."

That's ambitious, I say.

"Phheww," he says, in an epic sigh suggesting all the ups and downs of the 15-hour opera. "I tell you it's hard work. No, I'm not ever making it easy for myself. I feel a little bit like a mountaineer, you know; if it gets a little bit easier, then I take a more difficult route and when that gets too hard, then I change my technique. The way you reach the top can change."

I wonder whether von Trier feels the same way about writing scripts. Is it just as much of a struggle? Or does he enjoy creating his own universe? "Well, some of the threads have to ..."

The next day,
Dogville's
local distributor explains that von Trier demands that his face-to-face interviews last a minimum of an hour-and-a-half, but that his phone interviews last a maximum of 20 minutes. "Otherwise his ear gets sore," she says. Presumably, von Trier's Danish handler hung up.